It is that time of year again: Time to look back at information technology in 2024 and make light of it. As with reviews, this one will be arranged like an award ceremony. There are three criteria for the dozen awards we give out this year:• The award must be for something involving digital technology.• The key event must have taken place this year, 2024.• The award cannot take itself seriously. The event receiving attention must lend itself to sass, sarcasm, and ridicule. As a reminder, the awards are worth nothing. The only value is fifteen seconds of fleeting fame on this blog post.
Here is a short preview. This year, we have had many outstanding awards for Least Supporting Actor, Best Drama without Histrionics, and Best Short. We also have our annual Best Meme and Best Use of Digital Technology in Science awards and the James Bond and Rosebud awards.
Be assured that Elon Musk will win something. How could his antics not deserve at least some ridicule? Google and OpenAI will also receive awards since they have often been in the news this year. But newsworthy is not enough. No prize will go to Taylor Swift, who has contributed so much to the television ratings for the Kansas City Chiefs, which employs her boyfriend, Travis Kelce. Did you know that last year’s Superbowl, which the Chiefs won, was the largest streamed event ever, tying up almost a third of the internet’s traffic on that day? But I digress. Let’s start the fun. Best original screenplay. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and it is incredibly wonderful if satire can be added to the mix. This award goes to The Onion, who had the brilliant idea to bid for the website InfoWars, which Alex Jones used to preach hateful conspiracy theories. Jones lost his suit with the Sandy Hook families, and nobody with any sense of human decency shed a tear for him. He was forced into bankruptcy and forced to put up the site for sale. As of this writing, a judge has held up the transfer, so this may or may not happen. Even so, the headline was worth it, as it brightened up the morning it first appeared. Bless you, Onion. Every slice of material brings tears to my eyes.
Let’s get the awards to OpenAI out of the way. They are a double winner this year. The next award is for the Best Short Film. The award goes to OpenAI for the demo for Sora. Have you seen this? It is possible to make a film with just prompts. Look at those puppies. Look at the wooly mammoth. Look at the ocean. If you have not looked at this video, you should. Wow. Imagine the things one could fake with such a fictional film creation. Whoa. I expect them to return next year with a contender for best original screenplay.
Best use of Digital Technology in Science. Everybody knows that ChatGPT 4.o has a tough time doing complex math problems, but nobody expected such a leap forward quite so fast. OpenAI’s model o.1 solved 83.3% of math problems in the Olympiad by combining the LLM with another geometry-solving algorithm. For that accomplishment, they get the award. That is a massive improvement over ChatGPT4.o, which got 13% correct. Rumor has it that the o1 model takes vast amounts of computing to operate, and OpenAI will charge thousands of dollars for each prompt. That is an expensive toy, especially in light of the leaked details behind their $6.5B funding round — over $3B last year in revenue and over $11B expected next year, yet they are losing billions each year. While this award was a no-brainer, it might better fit science fiction instead of science. After all, OpenAI could also get an award for the best modern imitation of Frankenstein’s monster. Isn’t this one more step towards AGI? Oh, but I digress.
The next award is for Least Supporting Actor. This occasional award goes to the infrastructure firm that failed most at its basic job. There are multiple winners. All starred in horror flicks. The first winner is the Roku Horror Picture Show. The plot? Roku has a data breach, and everyone’s private data gets released to the dark web. The scariest part? Roku takes no responsibility for anything, and nobody can do anything about it. What a time warp! A second winner was The Crowd Strikes Back. In this intriguing corporate thriller, an unknown upstream provider of one component of the system, CrowdStrike, pushed a bug into widespread use. More than 3,400 plane flights into and within the US were canceled in a day. The movie ended as many tech whizzes spent their day fixing systems with meticulous repair procedures. The last winner stars AT&T Wireless in the production titled Burning Down the House. A technician loaded a bug into the network, blocking 92 million calls and 25 thousand attempts to call 911. All three movies contain the same dystopian ending: As the sun sets, the camera pans over grade school water fountains drying up, unlit traffic lights swaying in the wind, and automated doors in an office building refusing to open. The camera continues and enters the building, goes down a staircase and into a hallway, and settles in a room in the basement where a hapless technician frantically searches for the password to restart the electrical grid. He stops, mumbling to himself, and the audience learns that he kept the only copy of the password on a file on the cloud. As the camera fades, he realizes he cannot access the cloud because, after all, the electrical grid is down. Ouch.
Best Drama without histrionics. Despite prodding along for the last few years as the first major antitrust case in over two decades, the Federal Antitrust case against Google is the winner of this year’s award for drama. To be sure, nobody noticed the trial. Google’s lawyers kept testimony out of the public eye under the guise that the information was competitively sensitive. So, there were few headlines until Judge Mehta returned with a guilty verdict and provided a two-hundred-page explanation for what the fuss was about. The two most damning pieces of evidence? First, Google manipulated the ad auction to raise prices, and then employees covered up their tracks by altering the releases of information about the auction, making it less transparent. Second, Google paid — and continues to pay — Apple $18 Billion a year to be its exclusive search engine, which also turns out to be enough to disincentivize Apple from developing its own. (For $18B, I could find excuses to slow-walk the development of a search engine. Wouldn’t you?) Here is the thing about this document: About a quarter of it analyzes why Google has market power in some markets and not others. Which motivates the observation: It is all good to eliminate rash decision-making from antitrust reasoning. However, did society need more than four years of legal back-and-forth to determine something as seemingly obvious as “Google has market power”? Four years? *sigh* While this movie had little box office appeal, there is good reason to think a sequel is in the works. Its tentative title is “Throw the Book at Them.”
Now it is time for the James Bond Gadget Award, and this year, it involves both information technology and blowing up stuff. The winner is the Israeli secret service’s placement of bombs inside pagers and Walkie-Talkies, which were sold to Hezbollah. They exploded on September 17. If you missed the backstory, the Secret Service imitated a Hungary assembly operation for pagers and black market provider of Walkie-Talkies. You might reasonably wonder why Hezbollah was buying such primitive communications equipment at all. That is because the Israeli spy agency – like every other competent spy agency – had learned how to tap cell phone networks successfully. Hezbollah believed older communications technologies – i.e., pagers and walkie-talkies – would be more challenging to tap. Here is the thing about the bombs in these pagers: unlike a counter-missile strike, these exploding devices targeted soldiers of Hezbollah (and, from news reports, their handlers in the Iranian Embassy too). What was the most ironic part of the whole episode? Hezbollah’s indignation at being bested, as their spokesman declared the explosive pagers were an “act of war.” To which observers reacted with, “Huh?” Since October 8, 2023, for eleven straight months, Hezbollah had been tossing scores of Iranian-supplied rockets over the border each day, displacing almost one percent of the Israeli population from their homes. Weren’t they already at war? Needless to say, these little explosions were the beginning of an Israeli counter-offensive, and matters have not gone too well for Hezbollah since then.
Speaking of international intrigue, the next award is The Honorary Robert Ludlum Biggest Mystery Award. This award goes to the events that most resemble a movie made from a Robert Ludlum book. The events must contain international intrigue and unanswered questions. The award goes to Pavel Durov, who owns and manages Telegram. In case you missed the news, he recently was arrested and detained in France for failing requests to answer information from the French government about human trafficking on Telegram. A Russian by birth but a French and UAE citizen by choice, his service, Telegram, has grown to (reportedly) over 900m users worldwide. It is used by many who seek to evade government surveillance, which means it is the communication service of many well-meaning citizens of authoritarian governments, and also many creepy people from the dark web –drug runners, porn addicts, human traffickers, and nationalist Russian bloggers. As such, the service has become a flash point for some strange bedfellows defending free speech. Durov is a quirky dude, obsessed with his physique and sarcastic to a fault (in a way that only someone who has defied the Russian government seems capable of). Alas, his libertarian inclinations lead him to neglect any content moderation, even in the presence of violations of basic human decency. One mystery is why he refused to answer calls to stop human trafficking, which Telegram facilitates, and he could quickly stop it if he wanted to. This is part of what the French government wants him to do. An even bigger mystery is how somebody so smart could be so stupid and take a plane to one of the few countries where a government could legally serve him an arrest warrant.
Oh, we need to lighten up the mood. Let’s give the award for the Best meme. This year, the award goes to the memes about Princess Kate, who released a doctored family photo after announcing she has successfully gone through cancer treatment. Kate is just about the best thing the British royal family has going for it, and she has been dealing with chemo and deserves the world’s love. She got that and more once the doctoring was discovered. Kate said, “Like many amateur photographers, I occasionally experiment with editing.” That just asked for an affectionate response from the internet, and a little affection never hurt anyone. Welcome back to public life, Kate. We are glad to see you smile, and here’s hoping a few more doctored photos make you smile further.
Mr Smith goes to Washington award. This award goes to an amateur politician who sincerely tries to do some good for the world. This year’s winner is Vic Miller of Cheyenne, Wyoming, who ran for mayor on the premise that ChatGPT could run the city. No, seriously. He did. Before you dismiss this out of hand, if you read his platform, it is not entirely crazy. His basic idea is pretty plausible if you know anything about modern chatbots. In so many words, he said that most city government employees answer citizens’ requests by looking up local ordinances, filing documents, and keeping track of small matters like permits to build a parking lot. He proposed letting a chatbot operated by ChatGPT do as much of that as possible so the mayor could do the ceremonial stuff, such as ribbon cutting and attending memorial services. Before we go down a rabbit hole discussing how to train a chatbot on city documents, let’s first find out how the election turned out for Vic. The citizens of Cheyenne voted for candidates with more conventional visions; Vic got 3% of the vote. Welp. Perhaps his vision for local government is ahead of his time. Still, what do you want to bet he inspired someone? There are some entrepreneurs somewhere who have read about Vic’s idea, and I bet next year we will hear about a startup selling such a service to city governments.
Speaking of politics, it is time to give the annual Rose Bud Award. Named for the sled featured in the movie Citizen Kane, this award goes to the billionaire that society would most like to put on a sled and send down a snowy hill, preferably to stay there. Musk and Zuckerberg have been trading this award in the last few years, and Elon Musk earned it this year with three actions. First, Elon got in a spat with the Brazilian government over enabling misinformation on Twitter/X. The government threatened to arrest his Brazilian managers, so he moved them out of the country. Then, the government threatened to shut down X, and eventually, it did. After three weeks of no service, he backed off and removed the offending material. Second, he donated $250 million to the Trump campaign, which made him its biggest bankroller. Look, I am not criticizing the business decision. With an ethically challenged transactionally-oriented prospective president, Musk has bought his way to regulatory relief from investigations by the Security and Exchange Commission and the Department of Transportation. Most investors also assume Musk has also purchased additional contracts to send up rockets for NASA. All in all, his stock value has increased by far more than $250m. On the other hand, it is a flagrant violation of conflict-of-interest rules that every mortal human lives by (and a further sign that we have entered the late stages of capitalism). More to the point, it will be fodder for Congressional investigations after the house flips in the midterms. Third, he has joined with Vivek Ramaswamy, another smarmy rich guy, in an unofficial performative group called DOGE, which ostensibly stands for Department of Government Efficiency but is a cringy shoutout to DogeCoin, a digital currency that Musk likes. Here is the rub: Nobody expects DOGE to accomplish much except make headlines and keep Musk from managing Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX. However, the competent day-to-day managers at those firms are thrilled to see Elon distracted because when he shows up, Musk has no idea what is happening, and he just makes mistakes anyway. DOGE keeps him away. This raises the question of when we are all better off — when Musk mismanages the federal government or his own firms? Oh, but I digress again.
This next award takes no inspiration from movies but brings attention to a significant crisis. It is a new category of award called the Burning of the Modern Library of Alexandria. This refers to the denial-of-service attacks on the Internet Archive. The Archive operates the Way Back Machine, one of the Internet’s most valuable public services. Why, why, why? What evil effort motivates this attack? This is distinct from another problem the Archive has faced this year: selfish overuse. For example, on May 28, the Archive went down, providing the following details. “Apparently, an AI company is harvesting Internet Archive texts at an extreme rate.” Editorial to whoever this is: please refrain from illustrating theories about the overuse of the commons. Let the site alone so the staff can concentrate on fighting the truly evil folks out there. Everyone thanks you.
Let’s end this award ceremony in a lighter tone. This last award is always for some light but head shaking event that defies explanation. So it is called You Can’t Make This Stuff Up Award. The winner is Braintrust Air, who put out a job ad trying to hire someone to rewrite their AI-generated web pages so that they don’t sound like crappy AI. The punch line? Braintrust Air is an AI company. See the screenshots below from LinkedIn. Think about it.
************************************************************************ Those are the awards for this year! Bless you all for reading this far. And try not to forget the overarching lesson of these awards. Just because we live in an era of magnificent digital achievement, that is no excuse for neglecting a bit of human decency in your daily life. Have a wonderful new year!